FW Business Journal: And now for something entirely Spanky
Posted: Fri Feb 13, 2009 7:58 am
http://www.fwbusinesspress.com/display.php?id=9520
Michael H. Price’s ‘Southwest Heritage’:
And now for something entirely Spanky
BY MICHAEL H. PRICE
February 12, 2009
+ View Slideshow
… sort of goes without saying that Spanky was one of a kind.
— Leonard Maltin,
speaking of Fort Worth’s
Spanky McFarland
BY MICHAEL H. PRICE
The sharpest outside influence upon the first generation of provincial American rock ’n’ rollers may not have been the greater sphere of rock ’n’ roll, nor even the tribes of bluesmen and countrified Southern hipsters whose labors had spawned rock. I am inclined to believe that this influence lay, rather, in the sheer entreprenurial gumption of Depression-era youth, as chronicled in the surviving motion pictures from that age and transmitted intact into the very households of kids who were not so much as a gleam in their daddies’ eyes until after the close of World War II.
The medium, of course, was television — that innocuous-looking box, once a closed-circuit curiosity, that began infiltrating the culture as a mass medium just as a Postwar Baby Boom was proving itself capable of replenishing the populace and then some. The television receiver was soon to become, like the radio and the jukebox before it, one of those Ultimate Devices of Democracy, enabling one to impose one’s tastes, by choice or by chance, upon entire roomfuls of other people.
Now, original-for-television programming in those days was awkward and primitive, and costlier by far to produce than the network-radio broadcasts that television now threatened with extinction. Better to feed this voracious new monster with any and all prefabricated programming. Hence the resurrection of any number of moving pictures from the Depression years. Here was a harmless indulgence, or so it must have seemed, that not only validated the concept of recycling before there was a trendy term for the practice — but also reinforced the Depression hangover that would afflict the popular culture for the balance of the century and beyond.
These “old movies,” as the teevee-broadcasting industry perceived them, were no such thing to the first generation raised from infancy in the baleful alluring glare of the picture-tube. Seen cold, without preamble or historical context, the pictures were as new as the moment one switched on the receiver. Most prominent among these were such titles as the Popeye and Betty Boop animated cartoons from the Fleischer Bros.’ studios; the Three Stooges’ short-form comedies (which proved so popularly well received as to bring the surviving Stooges out of retirement); the so-called Shock! Theater package of weird mysteries and Hollywood Gothics from Universal Pictures; and the Our Gang comedies of producer Hal Roach and MGM Pictures.
Thus confronted with the Our Gang adventures — television packaged most of the ’thirties-period entries as Kids ’n’ Pets or, more widely, The Little Rascals, alluding to the series’ early-day name, Roach’s Rascals — that entire generation of children who also were born amidst the rise of rock ’n’ roll saw not their generalized ancestors cavorting upon the living-room screen. They saw, instead, an inadvertent reflection of Real Life: a community of kindred souls, kids behaving like kids of any stage of history. Here were kids with the moxie to assemble a jalopy from scrapyard discoveries, to organize a string band capable of barnstorming a local radio station, to commandeer a neighborhood outbuilding as a theatre in which to Put on a Show.
Yes, and if they could do it, then so could their audiences of the American Us. Combined with the dawning influence of rock ’n’ roll music, the exploits of the Our Gang youngsters persuaded many members of that earliest teevee audience to see whether they could Put on a Show with the best, or the least, of ’em.
“Funny thing you should mention that,” an Our Gang alumnus-slash-survivor named George ‘Spanky’ McFarland told me one afternoon in 1988, while visiting my newspaper office in Fort Worth. “You remember, a few years ago, when you brought Michael Jackson out to meet me?”
Well, sure, I remembered. The orchestration of that 1984 meeting (during a post-Thriller concert tour when Michael Jackson had still seemed more certifiably wholesome than certifiably peculiar) had been a nightmare of logistics and armed security. It had come together with rewarding results all ’round, though. I had not sat in on the visit between Jackson and McFarland, but I had remained close by to make certain the encounter progressed as planned, and I had come away from it with the impression that Jackson had fulfilled an ambition to become acquainted with one of his childhood heroes. (Jackson’s performance costumes in those days often included a lapel-button bearing Spanky’s likeness.) The session had been an imposition upon McFarland — who often rankled at impositions — but he had seemed genuinely pleased with the attention.
McFarland continued, there in the newsroom: “Well, y’know, what Michael Jackson went yammering on and on about, was how I’d ‘inspired’ him, or so he said in that unctuous whine of his, to get up there and be a showman. Said that he’d watch us Our Gang kids on television, day after day, actin’ like the whole world was our stage — and maybe it was, at that — and got the performing bug right then and there. ’Course, I guess it helped him to have a musically inclined family. And that noise they call rock ’n’ roll was about all there was to play, I guess, by the time he’d’ve been comin’ up.
“So anyhow,” said McFarland, “I guess I’d never’ve thought of our Little Rascals or Our Gang — or whatever-the-hell you want to call ’em — pictures as being any kind of an influence on this rock ’n’ roll business.”
“Yeah, well,” I replied, “so where do you think the Young Rascals came up with their name, or their early image? And how about that band that called itself Spanky & Our Gang?”
“Like I said: ‘Funny thing you should mention that,’” said McFarland. “Never listened to any Young Rascals recordings — I prefer Glenn Miller and Frankie Carle and Arthur Fiedler, and a little bit of Bob Wills, if you wanta get right down to it — but somebody showed me a record album by that bunch, and I caught kind of an Our Gang sense about it, grown-up men or not. ’Course, the clothes they were wearin’ in that photo looked more like Buster Brown, y’know.
“As for Spanky & Our Gang — well, I guess that was meant as some kind of a tribute on somebody’s part,” McFarland continued. “But I sure as hell sued their management for infringement, all the same. I don’t think that band lasted long enough to’ve bothered with.”
The spectacle of Spanky McFarland cussing and speaking of resentful litigation took some getting accustomed to. Even though he was fifty-nine years of age at the time and by turns businesslike, gruff, and ebullient, McFarland was still recognizably the chubby little kid with the Oliver Hardy-like mannerisms who had joined the Our Gang ensemble cast in 1931 and stuck with it, ever more uncomfortably, into the nineteen-forties.
“It was a lark, I guess you could say, when I was really little,” McFarland said of his early stardom, “but once the ‘Spanky’ identity caught on permanently and my kid-comedian career was assured for the longer term — most kid actors, including the Our Gang players, tended to get forcibly retired by age seven or thereabouts — then my folks just took it for granted that I was their Cash Cow. My Old Man just flat quit workin’ for a living, that’s How Green Was Our Valley in those days, and when I’d exhibit any sign of wantin’ to quit bein’ Spanky or try to broaden out my acting prospects, the Old Man’d get all bent outta shape and tell me, ‘Why, you can’t quit! You’re all we’ve got sustaining us!’ Manipulative hogwash like that. Which is why, if you look at most of those later Our Gangs after Mr. Hal Roach had sold the trademark to MGM, you can see me lookin’ not altogether pleased to be goin’ through the motions. I was bustin’ at the seams, and I don’t just mean the seams of that damned little fat-boy wardrobe they made me keep wearin’.”
By this time, the Dallas-born McFarland had long settled into Fort Worth as a businessman — “but once a ham, always a ham,” he would say — indulging a lingering interest in show business by working as a commercial pitchman for the Justin Boot Company. He had been, variously, a military flyer, a chauffeur, a soft-drink deliveryman, a television host in Oklahoma (showing, naturally, Our Gang comedies), and a salesman for the Magic Chef line of kitchen appliances. He never quit using the nickname of Spanky, which he regarded with mingled emotions.
“How many people could be Spanky McFarland,” he would wonder aloud, “and not end up as inmates of the funny farm? Some people call me “Cranky McFarland,” y’know.”
As a young man attempting to re-enter the movie business, McFarland found that casting directors “just couldn’t see me as anything but Spanky. And the fact that I was the once-and-future Spanky McFarland opened abso-damned-lutely no doors in Hollywood. I fared okay in some small-parts assignments of the ’forties, but come the nineteen-fifties, I couldn’t even get crowd-extra work.
“But nowadays, I guess the Spanky identity opens more doors than it seals shut,” he went on. “Certainly, that’s what brought about the connection with Michael Jackson — his ‘childhood-hero’ worship, as he calls it, plus the fact that former kid-star types tend to gravitate toward one another. Y’know, Michael Jackson could be a weird little guy without half trying, but you gotta admire the fact that he has become a star of some significance without becoming rude, nude, or crude in the process, without using four-letter words or championing dope abuse. So I guess the admiration is reciprocal — just don’t ask me to tune in on that racket he calls music.”
Hal Roach, who had nurtured the careers of such comedians as Charley Chase and Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy since the nineteen-twenties, launched the Our Gang series toward the close of the silent-screen age, inspired by a bunch of neighborhood children whose games and antics he could observe from his studio-office window. The gradually decisive arrival of sound-film technology during 1927-29 scuttled more careers than it helped, but Roach was quick to exploit the added dimension that audio recording could lend to his established players.
Most successful of these transitional series were the Laurel & Hardy and Our Gang short subjects. The series also shared a library of compelling musical cues, by-and-large the original compositions of Leroy Shield and T. Marvin Hatley. That initial Television Generation — probably the first to relate, kids-to-kids, to the Our Gangs, inasmuch as the theatrical audiences of the ’thirties had consisted for the most part of grown-ups — found its collective ears as thoroughly well attuned to Shield’s antically sentimental “The Good Old Days” (principal main-title theme for the Our Gang films) as to the emergence on radio of a rock ’n’ roll culture. The two forms of music seemed to go together, as far as that primary audience was concerned.
Dallas-born George McFarland, already an advertising model by age three, found himself stage-mothered (by an aunt, actually) into a 10-minute screen test for Roach-studio director James Horne in 1931. Spanky’s job here was to improvise a nursery tale. Hal Roach signed the boy that November. “And the rest is histrionics,” as a grown-up Spanky was fond of saying, relishing the wordplay.
Spanky — as in spank-able, a descriptive non-word that somebody on the Roach lot had coined — débuted in February of 1932 in a short comedy called “Free Eats.” He achieved an unusual title-role status in the following month’s production of “Spanky.” One year and seven short-subject pictures later, Spanky staged virtually a re-creation of his screen-test recitation for “Forgotten Babies,” whose principal set-piece features the four-year-old making up a Tarzan story wilder by far than anything that Edgar Rice Burroughs could have concocted.
Practically all the Roach-style Our Gangs, which continued into 1938 before moving to MGM, are distinguished by an air of spontaneity, although the narrative contrivances mount noticeably toward the end. McFarland remained central well beyond the Roach years, lending continuity as new faces came aboard and old-timers, comparatively speaking, outgrew the act.
The Our Gangs under MGM, the big studio that had distributed the Roach productions, started out impressively but degenerated over the longer stretch into vehicles for maudlin moral lessons and sermonellas of wartime patriotism. McFarland returned to Texas during the middle nineteen-forties, then made his ill-received bid to re-enter Hollywood in 1953. He would grace the big screen again during the middle nineteen-eighties, with a bit of gimmick-casting as a Nineteenth Century politician in a low-rent science-fiction Western movie called The Aurora Encounter.
“I wasn’t all that keen on doing the movie — any movie, for that matter — and I turned that offer down time and again,” McFarland said of The Aurora Encounter. “After all, I’d been 40 years absent from the movies.
“But Jim McCullough [Aurora’s Louisiana-based producer] persisted, and I relented. So much for that. Turned out to be a pretty decent little ol’ film.” (The Aurora Encounter and its companion film of the same period, Mountaintop Motel Massacre, feature dramatic underscoring by the Fort Worth-based violinist and jazz fiddler Carroll Hubbard.)
Devotées of the Our Gang films usually are admirers, too, of the films of Stanley Laurel and Oliver “Babe” Hardy, whose most enduring films also originated on the Roach lot. For observers who have remarked on a resemblance between Hardy and the preschool-age Spanky, McFarland offered this:
“I was aware of Laurel & Hardy, but of course our shooting sets were apart from their shooting sets, and while they put in an occasional on-screen or promotional appearance with the Gang [in 1933’s “Wild Poses,” for example] there wasn’t any real crossover influence that I know of. Apart from all the Roach pictures’ having a recognizable style, I mean.
“But coincidentally, Babe Hardy was a master of the double-take reaction, and so was I, instinctively, as a little kid, and my directors would encourage that. Hal Roach had the best double-take comics in the business — Babe Hardy, temperamental Jimmy Finlayson, cross-eyed Ben Turpin, blustery Irishman Edgar Kennedy, high-strung Charley Chase, and even my fellow Our Gang players, Jackie Cooper and Stymie [Matthew] Beard. But there was something of a greater resemblance between me and Oliver Hardy.
“And so the studio was quick to notice the similarities in style between me and Hardy, and there was even a short-lived attempt to develop a new comedy series with a family setting, kind of a situation comedy before there was any such of a word as sitcom. This was about 1934, at a time when Stan Laurel was having a contractual dispute with Hal Roach over salary and his, I mean Stanley’s, ambitions to become a producer as opposed to just a comedian. And this new series, it seems, would’ve starred Babe Hardy, with me as his son and Patsy Kelly as his wife.
“But then, Stan Laurel smoothed things over with Hal Roach, and Laurel & Hardy got back on track and carried on. I carried on with the Gang, and that was the end of that.
“And yes, I’ve noted the comparisons between me and Babe Hardy. The fact that we’re both a little round must have had something to do with all that.’
In 1992, while working with the USA Film Festival at Dallas, I helped to arrange a meeting between Spanky McFarland and Hal Roach when that eminénce grisé of Old Hollywood came to Texas for a career-retrospective event in honor of his hundredth birthday. The encounter proved cordial if stilted, for although both men remembered one another fondly they hardly had been chums during the heyday of the Our Gang pictures.
“Kind of a token summit meeting, I guess you could call it,” McFarland reflected later. “Mr. Roach always had been kind of a distant figure of authority, as far as we kids were concerned — not really even any kind of father-figure. He was the Big Businessman who ran the studio, and we were the commodities. But it was nice to see him again, for the one last time.”
Roach died not long after he had passed that century-mark. Spanky McFarland died, unexpectedly, the following year.
“George was predisposed to apoplexy,” as a lawyer who had handled McFarland’s frequent outbursts of resentful litigation wrote me after I had published a memorial column. “Always looking for the next thing to get all bent out of shape about, usually involving some hapless entrepreneur trying to cash in on the name Spanky in some way or another. A delightful fellow, in so many ways — but haunted.”
That litigious legacy reasserted itself one last time in 1994, when corporate Hollywood mounted a postmodern Little Rascals film under director Penelope Spheeris. No sooner had the movie been issued than McFarland’s widow, Doris Taulman McFarland, announced a lawsuit on a complaint of misappropriation of the Spanky monicker. The action proved ineffectual, although its last hurrah for George McFarland’s pastime of litigation-with-indignation may have been an end in itself. Nor did the new film or its Spanky-surrogate, a vaguely look-alike kid from Texas named Travis Tedford, do anything to diminish the overriding and age-defiant appeal of the genuine article.
Michael H. Price’s ‘Southwest Heritage’:
And now for something entirely Spanky
BY MICHAEL H. PRICE
February 12, 2009
+ View Slideshow
… sort of goes without saying that Spanky was one of a kind.
— Leonard Maltin,
speaking of Fort Worth’s
Spanky McFarland
BY MICHAEL H. PRICE
The sharpest outside influence upon the first generation of provincial American rock ’n’ rollers may not have been the greater sphere of rock ’n’ roll, nor even the tribes of bluesmen and countrified Southern hipsters whose labors had spawned rock. I am inclined to believe that this influence lay, rather, in the sheer entreprenurial gumption of Depression-era youth, as chronicled in the surviving motion pictures from that age and transmitted intact into the very households of kids who were not so much as a gleam in their daddies’ eyes until after the close of World War II.
The medium, of course, was television — that innocuous-looking box, once a closed-circuit curiosity, that began infiltrating the culture as a mass medium just as a Postwar Baby Boom was proving itself capable of replenishing the populace and then some. The television receiver was soon to become, like the radio and the jukebox before it, one of those Ultimate Devices of Democracy, enabling one to impose one’s tastes, by choice or by chance, upon entire roomfuls of other people.
Now, original-for-television programming in those days was awkward and primitive, and costlier by far to produce than the network-radio broadcasts that television now threatened with extinction. Better to feed this voracious new monster with any and all prefabricated programming. Hence the resurrection of any number of moving pictures from the Depression years. Here was a harmless indulgence, or so it must have seemed, that not only validated the concept of recycling before there was a trendy term for the practice — but also reinforced the Depression hangover that would afflict the popular culture for the balance of the century and beyond.
These “old movies,” as the teevee-broadcasting industry perceived them, were no such thing to the first generation raised from infancy in the baleful alluring glare of the picture-tube. Seen cold, without preamble or historical context, the pictures were as new as the moment one switched on the receiver. Most prominent among these were such titles as the Popeye and Betty Boop animated cartoons from the Fleischer Bros.’ studios; the Three Stooges’ short-form comedies (which proved so popularly well received as to bring the surviving Stooges out of retirement); the so-called Shock! Theater package of weird mysteries and Hollywood Gothics from Universal Pictures; and the Our Gang comedies of producer Hal Roach and MGM Pictures.
Thus confronted with the Our Gang adventures — television packaged most of the ’thirties-period entries as Kids ’n’ Pets or, more widely, The Little Rascals, alluding to the series’ early-day name, Roach’s Rascals — that entire generation of children who also were born amidst the rise of rock ’n’ roll saw not their generalized ancestors cavorting upon the living-room screen. They saw, instead, an inadvertent reflection of Real Life: a community of kindred souls, kids behaving like kids of any stage of history. Here were kids with the moxie to assemble a jalopy from scrapyard discoveries, to organize a string band capable of barnstorming a local radio station, to commandeer a neighborhood outbuilding as a theatre in which to Put on a Show.
Yes, and if they could do it, then so could their audiences of the American Us. Combined with the dawning influence of rock ’n’ roll music, the exploits of the Our Gang youngsters persuaded many members of that earliest teevee audience to see whether they could Put on a Show with the best, or the least, of ’em.
“Funny thing you should mention that,” an Our Gang alumnus-slash-survivor named George ‘Spanky’ McFarland told me one afternoon in 1988, while visiting my newspaper office in Fort Worth. “You remember, a few years ago, when you brought Michael Jackson out to meet me?”
Well, sure, I remembered. The orchestration of that 1984 meeting (during a post-Thriller concert tour when Michael Jackson had still seemed more certifiably wholesome than certifiably peculiar) had been a nightmare of logistics and armed security. It had come together with rewarding results all ’round, though. I had not sat in on the visit between Jackson and McFarland, but I had remained close by to make certain the encounter progressed as planned, and I had come away from it with the impression that Jackson had fulfilled an ambition to become acquainted with one of his childhood heroes. (Jackson’s performance costumes in those days often included a lapel-button bearing Spanky’s likeness.) The session had been an imposition upon McFarland — who often rankled at impositions — but he had seemed genuinely pleased with the attention.
McFarland continued, there in the newsroom: “Well, y’know, what Michael Jackson went yammering on and on about, was how I’d ‘inspired’ him, or so he said in that unctuous whine of his, to get up there and be a showman. Said that he’d watch us Our Gang kids on television, day after day, actin’ like the whole world was our stage — and maybe it was, at that — and got the performing bug right then and there. ’Course, I guess it helped him to have a musically inclined family. And that noise they call rock ’n’ roll was about all there was to play, I guess, by the time he’d’ve been comin’ up.
“So anyhow,” said McFarland, “I guess I’d never’ve thought of our Little Rascals or Our Gang — or whatever-the-hell you want to call ’em — pictures as being any kind of an influence on this rock ’n’ roll business.”
“Yeah, well,” I replied, “so where do you think the Young Rascals came up with their name, or their early image? And how about that band that called itself Spanky & Our Gang?”
“Like I said: ‘Funny thing you should mention that,’” said McFarland. “Never listened to any Young Rascals recordings — I prefer Glenn Miller and Frankie Carle and Arthur Fiedler, and a little bit of Bob Wills, if you wanta get right down to it — but somebody showed me a record album by that bunch, and I caught kind of an Our Gang sense about it, grown-up men or not. ’Course, the clothes they were wearin’ in that photo looked more like Buster Brown, y’know.
“As for Spanky & Our Gang — well, I guess that was meant as some kind of a tribute on somebody’s part,” McFarland continued. “But I sure as hell sued their management for infringement, all the same. I don’t think that band lasted long enough to’ve bothered with.”
The spectacle of Spanky McFarland cussing and speaking of resentful litigation took some getting accustomed to. Even though he was fifty-nine years of age at the time and by turns businesslike, gruff, and ebullient, McFarland was still recognizably the chubby little kid with the Oliver Hardy-like mannerisms who had joined the Our Gang ensemble cast in 1931 and stuck with it, ever more uncomfortably, into the nineteen-forties.
“It was a lark, I guess you could say, when I was really little,” McFarland said of his early stardom, “but once the ‘Spanky’ identity caught on permanently and my kid-comedian career was assured for the longer term — most kid actors, including the Our Gang players, tended to get forcibly retired by age seven or thereabouts — then my folks just took it for granted that I was their Cash Cow. My Old Man just flat quit workin’ for a living, that’s How Green Was Our Valley in those days, and when I’d exhibit any sign of wantin’ to quit bein’ Spanky or try to broaden out my acting prospects, the Old Man’d get all bent outta shape and tell me, ‘Why, you can’t quit! You’re all we’ve got sustaining us!’ Manipulative hogwash like that. Which is why, if you look at most of those later Our Gangs after Mr. Hal Roach had sold the trademark to MGM, you can see me lookin’ not altogether pleased to be goin’ through the motions. I was bustin’ at the seams, and I don’t just mean the seams of that damned little fat-boy wardrobe they made me keep wearin’.”
By this time, the Dallas-born McFarland had long settled into Fort Worth as a businessman — “but once a ham, always a ham,” he would say — indulging a lingering interest in show business by working as a commercial pitchman for the Justin Boot Company. He had been, variously, a military flyer, a chauffeur, a soft-drink deliveryman, a television host in Oklahoma (showing, naturally, Our Gang comedies), and a salesman for the Magic Chef line of kitchen appliances. He never quit using the nickname of Spanky, which he regarded with mingled emotions.
“How many people could be Spanky McFarland,” he would wonder aloud, “and not end up as inmates of the funny farm? Some people call me “Cranky McFarland,” y’know.”
As a young man attempting to re-enter the movie business, McFarland found that casting directors “just couldn’t see me as anything but Spanky. And the fact that I was the once-and-future Spanky McFarland opened abso-damned-lutely no doors in Hollywood. I fared okay in some small-parts assignments of the ’forties, but come the nineteen-fifties, I couldn’t even get crowd-extra work.
“But nowadays, I guess the Spanky identity opens more doors than it seals shut,” he went on. “Certainly, that’s what brought about the connection with Michael Jackson — his ‘childhood-hero’ worship, as he calls it, plus the fact that former kid-star types tend to gravitate toward one another. Y’know, Michael Jackson could be a weird little guy without half trying, but you gotta admire the fact that he has become a star of some significance without becoming rude, nude, or crude in the process, without using four-letter words or championing dope abuse. So I guess the admiration is reciprocal — just don’t ask me to tune in on that racket he calls music.”
Hal Roach, who had nurtured the careers of such comedians as Charley Chase and Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy since the nineteen-twenties, launched the Our Gang series toward the close of the silent-screen age, inspired by a bunch of neighborhood children whose games and antics he could observe from his studio-office window. The gradually decisive arrival of sound-film technology during 1927-29 scuttled more careers than it helped, but Roach was quick to exploit the added dimension that audio recording could lend to his established players.
Most successful of these transitional series were the Laurel & Hardy and Our Gang short subjects. The series also shared a library of compelling musical cues, by-and-large the original compositions of Leroy Shield and T. Marvin Hatley. That initial Television Generation — probably the first to relate, kids-to-kids, to the Our Gangs, inasmuch as the theatrical audiences of the ’thirties had consisted for the most part of grown-ups — found its collective ears as thoroughly well attuned to Shield’s antically sentimental “The Good Old Days” (principal main-title theme for the Our Gang films) as to the emergence on radio of a rock ’n’ roll culture. The two forms of music seemed to go together, as far as that primary audience was concerned.
Dallas-born George McFarland, already an advertising model by age three, found himself stage-mothered (by an aunt, actually) into a 10-minute screen test for Roach-studio director James Horne in 1931. Spanky’s job here was to improvise a nursery tale. Hal Roach signed the boy that November. “And the rest is histrionics,” as a grown-up Spanky was fond of saying, relishing the wordplay.
Spanky — as in spank-able, a descriptive non-word that somebody on the Roach lot had coined — débuted in February of 1932 in a short comedy called “Free Eats.” He achieved an unusual title-role status in the following month’s production of “Spanky.” One year and seven short-subject pictures later, Spanky staged virtually a re-creation of his screen-test recitation for “Forgotten Babies,” whose principal set-piece features the four-year-old making up a Tarzan story wilder by far than anything that Edgar Rice Burroughs could have concocted.
Practically all the Roach-style Our Gangs, which continued into 1938 before moving to MGM, are distinguished by an air of spontaneity, although the narrative contrivances mount noticeably toward the end. McFarland remained central well beyond the Roach years, lending continuity as new faces came aboard and old-timers, comparatively speaking, outgrew the act.
The Our Gangs under MGM, the big studio that had distributed the Roach productions, started out impressively but degenerated over the longer stretch into vehicles for maudlin moral lessons and sermonellas of wartime patriotism. McFarland returned to Texas during the middle nineteen-forties, then made his ill-received bid to re-enter Hollywood in 1953. He would grace the big screen again during the middle nineteen-eighties, with a bit of gimmick-casting as a Nineteenth Century politician in a low-rent science-fiction Western movie called The Aurora Encounter.
“I wasn’t all that keen on doing the movie — any movie, for that matter — and I turned that offer down time and again,” McFarland said of The Aurora Encounter. “After all, I’d been 40 years absent from the movies.
“But Jim McCullough [Aurora’s Louisiana-based producer] persisted, and I relented. So much for that. Turned out to be a pretty decent little ol’ film.” (The Aurora Encounter and its companion film of the same period, Mountaintop Motel Massacre, feature dramatic underscoring by the Fort Worth-based violinist and jazz fiddler Carroll Hubbard.)
Devotées of the Our Gang films usually are admirers, too, of the films of Stanley Laurel and Oliver “Babe” Hardy, whose most enduring films also originated on the Roach lot. For observers who have remarked on a resemblance between Hardy and the preschool-age Spanky, McFarland offered this:
“I was aware of Laurel & Hardy, but of course our shooting sets were apart from their shooting sets, and while they put in an occasional on-screen or promotional appearance with the Gang [in 1933’s “Wild Poses,” for example] there wasn’t any real crossover influence that I know of. Apart from all the Roach pictures’ having a recognizable style, I mean.
“But coincidentally, Babe Hardy was a master of the double-take reaction, and so was I, instinctively, as a little kid, and my directors would encourage that. Hal Roach had the best double-take comics in the business — Babe Hardy, temperamental Jimmy Finlayson, cross-eyed Ben Turpin, blustery Irishman Edgar Kennedy, high-strung Charley Chase, and even my fellow Our Gang players, Jackie Cooper and Stymie [Matthew] Beard. But there was something of a greater resemblance between me and Oliver Hardy.
“And so the studio was quick to notice the similarities in style between me and Hardy, and there was even a short-lived attempt to develop a new comedy series with a family setting, kind of a situation comedy before there was any such of a word as sitcom. This was about 1934, at a time when Stan Laurel was having a contractual dispute with Hal Roach over salary and his, I mean Stanley’s, ambitions to become a producer as opposed to just a comedian. And this new series, it seems, would’ve starred Babe Hardy, with me as his son and Patsy Kelly as his wife.
“But then, Stan Laurel smoothed things over with Hal Roach, and Laurel & Hardy got back on track and carried on. I carried on with the Gang, and that was the end of that.
“And yes, I’ve noted the comparisons between me and Babe Hardy. The fact that we’re both a little round must have had something to do with all that.’
In 1992, while working with the USA Film Festival at Dallas, I helped to arrange a meeting between Spanky McFarland and Hal Roach when that eminénce grisé of Old Hollywood came to Texas for a career-retrospective event in honor of his hundredth birthday. The encounter proved cordial if stilted, for although both men remembered one another fondly they hardly had been chums during the heyday of the Our Gang pictures.
“Kind of a token summit meeting, I guess you could call it,” McFarland reflected later. “Mr. Roach always had been kind of a distant figure of authority, as far as we kids were concerned — not really even any kind of father-figure. He was the Big Businessman who ran the studio, and we were the commodities. But it was nice to see him again, for the one last time.”
Roach died not long after he had passed that century-mark. Spanky McFarland died, unexpectedly, the following year.
“George was predisposed to apoplexy,” as a lawyer who had handled McFarland’s frequent outbursts of resentful litigation wrote me after I had published a memorial column. “Always looking for the next thing to get all bent out of shape about, usually involving some hapless entrepreneur trying to cash in on the name Spanky in some way or another. A delightful fellow, in so many ways — but haunted.”
That litigious legacy reasserted itself one last time in 1994, when corporate Hollywood mounted a postmodern Little Rascals film under director Penelope Spheeris. No sooner had the movie been issued than McFarland’s widow, Doris Taulman McFarland, announced a lawsuit on a complaint of misappropriation of the Spanky monicker. The action proved ineffectual, although its last hurrah for George McFarland’s pastime of litigation-with-indignation may have been an end in itself. Nor did the new film or its Spanky-surrogate, a vaguely look-alike kid from Texas named Travis Tedford, do anything to diminish the overriding and age-defiant appeal of the genuine article.